On this day in recovered history, May 4, Emma Goldman, Bakunin, Haymarket Square Bombing, Jean Grave, Paris May '68, Gary Snyder, Ken Knabb, Daniel Berrigan, anarchism, anarchy, anarchist, libertarian, syndicalism, anarcosindicalista
UMM KULTHUM
Epic Egyptian singer, film actress, Arab cultural activist.
Prophet Mohammed's TRIP TO HEAVEN & BACK.
DANDELION FESTIVAL in Dover, Ohio; principally a dandelion recipe exposition.
Medieval Plant of the Day: stock gillyflower, Mathiola incana.
1493 -- Alexander VI divides non-Christian world between Spain & Portugal.
1494 -- New Old World: Arawaks of Jamaica discover European invaders.
Author Penny Slinger depicts the Arawaks' daily life, ceremonial rituals, body decorating, dream landscapes, & voyages. Sensual, mysterious & magical, Visions of the Arawaks conveys a romantic, but tangible feeling of a communal way of life among this matriarchal people so gentle they had no word for war.
"I feel a spiritual homesickness for the world of the Arawaks," she says.
"They lived in harmony with nature & honored the spirit in all things. It is not only their culture we need to uncover, but a part of ourselves."
1527 -- Shohaku dies. Japanese scholar/author of the late Muromachi period (1338-1573), notable for waka & renga (linked-verse) poetry.
1771 -- Beginning date of J.W. von Goethe novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
[Source: Robert Braunwart] Hereafter denoted by this symbol:
1796 -- William Prescott lives (1796-1859). When he was at Harvard "a crust of bread thrown during a melee in the student commons caused virtual blindness in his left eye" (Britannica).
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1825 -- England: Darwin's Bulldog, T. H. Huxley lives. English scientist, Humanist,foremost British popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution. His investigations in comparative anatomy, paleontology, & evolution exerted a great influence on the 19th century biology. Grandfather of biologist Julian Huxley & author Aldous Huxley.
1851 -- Czechoslovakia: During this month Mikhail Bakunin, is tried in Prague & condemned to death.
Bakunin's death sentence is commuted to life in prison. He is handed over to the Russians & imprisoned in the dreaded dungeons, the Alexis ravelin of the Fortress of Peter & Paul in St. Petersburg.
1852 -- Alice Liddell lives. The inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, about a little girl who falls down a hole.
1861 -- Emily Dickinson publishes "The May-Wine" in the "Springfield Republican."
1872 -- Harold Bell Wright lives, Rome, NY, author (Shepherd of the Hills).
1873 -- William Holmes McGuffey, US educator, text author (McGuffey's Readers are still collected today), dies at 72, Va..
1886 -- US: Haymarket Square Bombing. A bomb kills seven Chicago cops as they attack demonstrators at a rally protesting police brutality yesterday at McCormick Reaper Works.
Eight — including speakers at the meeting — are arrested. Four anarchists (August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer & George Engel) are subsequently hanged for murder after a show trial & another (Louis Lingg) killed himself. No evidence linking them with the bombing has ever been found & the Chief of police manufactured his own evidence. Illinois governor John P. Altgeld denounced the trial as a travesty & pardoned some (knowingly destroying his political career).
'There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are strangling to-day'
— Albert Spies
1886 -- US: In Milwaukee, meanwhile, members of the Polish Assembly of the Knights of Labor march from St. Stanislaus Church to the North Chicago Rolling Mills, shutting down factories on their way. The combined forces of city & county cops are unable to stop the march, & the sheriff requests National Guard troops.
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1887 -- US: First modern communitarian experiment in Washington State: Puget Sound Cooperative Colony founded at Port Angeles.
1895 -- France: First appearance of Jean Grave's weekly magazine of "Les Temps Nouveaux," which, until August 8, 1914, is a formidable journal of anarchist ideas & propaganda. Grave collected many talented artists, illustrators & writers to contribute over the years.
4 mai.- Premier numéro du journal de l'anarchiste Jean Grave, "Les Temps Nouveaux".
1912 -- Elvi Sinervo lives (1912-1986). Finnish writer, translator, humanist & communist, who depicted the political class struggle of the poor. Translated Kleist, Kazantzakis, Brecht, Lidman, Kafka & Andric. A central figure in the Kiila literary movement with Arvo Turtiainen & Viljo Kajava. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sinervo.htm
1919 -- Roger Paon, lives, Maritime Seine. French socialist, then an anarchiste & pacifiste.
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Paon joined the Socialist Youth for a brief period in 1933, before turning to the libertarians, particularly the group l'Union Anarchiste de Rouen. He was also a member of the Ligue Internationale des Combattants de la paix, which aided in the resistance to the occupation during WWII.
Paon lived in Nice following the war, collaborating on libertarian publications, & publishing his own newspaper, "L'ordre Social" (1950-1953). He also agitated, with Louis Lecoin, for the recognition of rights of conscientious objection. Roger Paon is the author of Marine de Rivière, a work on shipping.
1919 -- China: Students demonstrate in Peking - beginning of the May 4th Movement.
1919 -- Australia: Battle of the Barricades on the Fremantle, waterfront, between striking wharf laborers, strikebreakers & police (-May 8); 1 person is killed & 33 injured.
1920 -- US: Sacco & Vanzetti learn of their comrade Andrea Salsedo’s death. Salseda plunged from the 14th floor of the Department of Justice offices while being secretly held & interrogated. Believing he was tossed to his death yesterday, Sacco & Vanzetti fear they will be implicated in a bomb plot. They are arrested tomorrow — accused instead of murder in a bank robbery.
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1921 -- US: The libertarian & utopian "Home Colony" in Washington State ends. See the article in the Stan Iverson Memorial Archives,
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/
1922 -- US: In the Sacco & Vanzetti case, the Gould & Pelser motions are made.
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1924 -- England: Edith Nesbit, socialist & a children's author, dies at 65, Kent.
1924 -- Spain: C.N.T. (Congrès du 4 mai 1924), à Barcelone, contrainte à la plus extême prudence depuis le coup d'Etat militaire de Primo de Rivera du 13 septembre 1923, la C.N.T tient ce jour-là son dernier congrès national avant de passer dans la clandestinité.
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Les 237 délégués présents moins une voix y réaffirment que "la CNT a pour objectif l'implantation du communisme libertaire par la voie de l'insurrection armée." Le Congrès se termine dans une tension extrême, causée par l'intervention de la police. Une grande partie des participants réussit pourtant à s'échapper, ce n'est par le cas de Garcia Oliver qui, arrêté, sera incarcéré à Burgos. Il n'en sortira qu'à l'amnistie du 14 avril 1931.
1929 -- Roland Giguere lives, Montreal, poet (La Main au feu), painter, publisher.
1931 -- US: Gun-toting vigilantes attack striking miners & union militants in Harlan County, Kentucky.
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1935 -- Canada:
May 4-14 Emma Goldman sails from Canada to Le Havre, France; she reaches Paris on May 15.
On May 18 Emma arrives back in St. Tropez in time to celebrate the anniversary of Alexander Berkman's release from prison in 1906; she finds him in better health than she expected.
1937 -- Spain: (Tuesday): Gun-battles throughout the night in Barcelona. Many barricades & violent clashes throughout the city.
In the Sants barrio 400 Guards are stripped of their weapons. Companys asks the Valencia government for aircraft to bomb the anarchist CNT's premises & barracks. The CNT-controlled artillery on Montjuich & Tibidabo is trained on the Generalidad Palace....
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1937 -- African-American abstract sculptor Melvin Edwards lives, in Texass. Given a 30-year retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York. One works is located in the garden of the White House, another at the Thomas Jefferson Park & Pool, First Avenue & 116th Street, Manhattan. http://www.absolutearts.com/masters/e/edwards-melvin.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Edwards
1938 -- Germany: Carl von Ossietzky dies, Hamburg. Pacifist & winner of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize while in a Nazi concentration camp.
In Berlin upon the 4th of May
19 hundred & 38
The Gestapo with its treatment
Signed his death certificate
Five-six-two his prison number
Listen, child, I beg you please
Keep in mind, always remember,
He got the Nobel Prize for Peace
In the struggle against injustice
He fought hard & he fought long
Child — remember Ossietsky
Peace won't come by words alone
"Well, Jim, I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell."
1941 -- US: George F. Will lives. Rightwing political analyst, columnist, baseball fanatic.
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
— Night Line
1941 -- Robin Cook lives, NYC. Thriller writer (Coma, Brain).
1946 -- China: The Communist Party decides to go ahead with land reform in the regions it controls. The estates of big landowners will be confiscated & distributed to the poor peasants.
Source: [K.S. Karol]
1947 -- Australia: Peter Kocan, lives, Newcastle, would-be assassin of Arthur Calwell, Australian Labor Party leader, poet, novelist (The Cure).
1947 -- Palestine: Jewish terrorists blast open a prison in Acre, freeing 33 Jewish & 183 Arab prisoners.
1950 -- William Rose Benet, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, dies at 64, NYC.
1953 -- Visionary Aldous Huxley (age 58) takes mescaline, his first psychedelic trip. See (The Doors of Perception)
British novelist (Brave New World, Island), psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley dies on LSD, Hollywood. His last request is for an injection of LSD. Pacifist author of Brave New World.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, onetime SAINT 1997
Pioneer mescaline head, dystopian prophet.
1961 -- US: "Freedom Ride" (biracial) bus trips begin throughout American South, organized by James Farmer & Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to desegregate bus terminals. Many northern civil rights activists join their southern compatriots in demonstrations for integration of public places, challenging non-compliance of 1957 & 1960 civil rights legislation. See May 14, when first bus is attacked.
1961 -- Phenomenologist/existentialist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, dies.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
French existential phenomenologist, commie fellow-traveler.
The world is... the natural setting of, & field for, all my thoughts & all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not "inhabit" only "the inner man," or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, & only in the world does he know himself.
1963 -- US: Trained All Winter, Balking Up? Pitcher Bob Shaw sets record of five balks in a baseball game.
1964 -- US: Trade embargo imposed on North Vietnam in response to attacks from the North on South Vietnam.
1968 -- France: May '68, in Paris & nationwide: Courses at the Sorbonne are suspended. The UNEF & the Snesup call for unlimited strikes. Capitalism is discovering revolution is still a threat, even in first world industrial & consumer nations. Something is awry in paradise.
1968 -- US: Since January of this year, 40,000 students have participated in 221 major demonstrations on 101 campuses.
1969 -- US: Going Nowhere Fast? In Seattle, Washington several thousand march in the Arboretum to protest construction of a freeway planned to follow the Lake Washington shoreline throughout Seattle. Partially built ramps remain visible today to commuters sitting in idling cars on freeways.
1970 -- US: Four Kent State University students murdered by Ohio National Guardsmen at a demonstration protesting the US incursion into Cambodia (see 30 April).
Despite warnings from advisers that invading Cambodia (Operation Duck Hook) would lead to domestic bloodshed, Kissinger & Nixon decided to invade to prove Nixon's toughness. Nixon was boozing heavily & repeatedly watching Patton to bolster himself. Many staffers worried he'd gone off the deep end mentally. He directed staffers to take a public hard-line posture toward critics/protesters:
"Having drawn the sword, don't take it out — stick it in hard."
One of the killed, Allison Krause, the day before her murder, was reported to have put a flower on a National Guardsman's rifle, saying that "Flowers are better than bullets."
With the Kent State killings the White House was stunned, more worried about mushrooming protest than the deaths, which many blamed on students themselves; J. Edgar Hoover advised that one of the women killed had been "sleeping around" & was "nothing more than a whore." VP Spiro Agnew fulminated about "traitors & thieves & perverts & irrational & illogical people in our midst." [Sounds like the White House. —ed.]
America's campuses exploded, finally joined in the streets by middle America, by workers, & even dissidents within the government itself.
1970 -- US: City of Chicago unveils a new monument to policemen killed in Haymarket Square.
Chicago police, with a tradition of indiscriminately shooting & killing unarmed workers & their supporters, are honored.
The statue, oddly enough, keeps getting knocked over by the citizenry.
1970 -- US: 5,000 demonstrate at College Park, Washington, DC. 450 policemen unable to disperse them, 600 National Guard sent in — to protect them, right?
Fire spins the driveshaft of this ship, full of smooth oil & noise — blood
of the palms of d’antan — sweet oil of the gritty earth —
embraced in welded plates of perfect steel.
1981 -- Paul Green, American novelist/playwright dies, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Well-known for perceptive portrayal of Southern blacks. He collaborated with Richard Wright in the dramatization of Native Son.
1983 -- US: House of Representatives passes (watered down) nuclear freeze. Tabled in the Senate. Like a morgue in there...
1987 -- Bluesman Paul Butterfield, 44, dies due to complications of a drug overdose.
1989 -- China: 30,000 students — apparently unaware they live in a People's Democracy — march to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, for democracy.
1989 -- US: Rightwing sweetheart Oliver North, a key figure in Ronnie Reagan's shadow government, is convicted in the Iran-Contra Affair.
Sales for some novelty toys fizzle rather than sizzle.
In the summer 1987, after Marine Lt. Col. Ollie North's testimony captivates the nation during the Iran-Contra hearings, a San Francisco couple loses $30,000 trying to market a doll based on this criminal.
By that Christmas, the couple announce plans to recover their loss by taking Ollie's head off the doll's body & replacing it with a likeness of Mikhail Gorbachev, a then popular Soviet leader.
1991 -- US: Hip Hop? Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Bush is hospitalized for erratic heartbeat. America wails at the thought of a President Quayle.
Quote: "I want to be Robin to Bush's Batman."
Quote: "The other day [the President] said, I know you've had some rough times, & I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity & sense of responsibility. (He paused, then said) Would you like a puppy?"
— Vice President Dan Quayle (LA Times 5/21/89), perennial wanna be
1992 -- US: "Newsweek" estimates 100 million people in the world are enslaved.
1993 -- Kampuchea (Cambodia): Dhammayietra, walk for peace, to Phnom Penh, begins, Siem Reap.
1996 -- US: Six arrested in New York City museum of U.S.S. Intrepid — in honor of Fr. Daniel Berrigan's 75th birthday.
Berrigan wrote in his journal that the prison blue jeans & denim shirt form "a clerical attire I highly recommend for a new church."
1998 -- Australia: High Court orders Patrick Stevedoring to rehire 1,400 fired union dock workers.
2001 -- The European Court of Human Rights rules the UK violated the rights of 12 IRA supporters British forces shot to death in Northern Ireland.
2006 -- Italy: In Luzzara, an homage to Riccardo Siliprandi is held on occasion of the 61st anniversary of the liberation (WWII). Siliprandi was an anarcosindacalista & antifascist murdered by a fascist squad in May 1921. He was part of the Luzzara anarchist group, with some 36 members. Now interred with other antifascist partisans in the Mausoleo dei partigiana Luzzaresi.
Riccardo Siliprandi sindacalista anarchico assassinio labor trade unionist http://www.anarca-bolo.ch/a-rivista/318/15.htm
3000 --
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."
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anarchist, labor, & radical used booksSee also: Anarchist Encyclopedia http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/gallery/galleryindex.htm Stan Iverson Memorial Library http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/ Anarchist Time Line / Chronology http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/indexTimeline.htm
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